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Best Use Of Local Ingredients

Gold Winner The Wooden Monkey, Halifax

Silver Winner Chives Canadian Bistro

Bronze Winner 2 Doors Down Food + Wine

The Wooden Monkey is more than a delicious restaurant. It’s also a platform—and laboratory—for co-owner Lil MacPherson’s mission to fix the world. “From the start of The Monkey it’s always been about local,” MacPherson says, launching into the benefits of eating food that hasn’t travelled halfway around the world to your plate: local food taste better, supporting homegrown agriculture increases our food security, it helps the local economy and it can fight global warming. “Food is a really big piece of climate change,” says MacPherson, from rain forests cut down for agriculture to the potential for “sustainable regenerative architecture" to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into the soil. “Local ingredients are paramount to me,” MacPherson says, “for us to move forward.”